So it is done. Teenager Melrose’s £8bn has bought it 260 years of British engineering excellence once they convinced GKN shareholders their short term ‘buy, improve, sell’ approach would add more value to their investment than the existing management. The perfectly rational and well informed market players have chosen the most economically optimal option which will grow their wealth and therefore that of the nation. Move along, nothing to see here says Greg Clark. This is the way a free market works.

He is wrong. What we are actually witnessing is the death and burial of this Government’s short lived, callously neglected and brutally beaten Industrial Strategy, at the tender age of 18 months.